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DreamWorksThe visuals are fly in "Bee Movie," but it's hard to get excited about a genre that's more about product than art.

Those who were (still) wondering what Jerry Seinfeld would do to follow up on the phenomenal success of his ubiquitous sitcom finally have their answer, and frankly, it's not very interesting.

The funnyman has chosen to grab his take from the highly lucrative till of animated kiddie flicks, while it's still there to be grabbed. This is all he's done, and it's not very much.

Someday this trend of impossibly shiny, computerized animation married with cute, anthropomorphized members of the animal kingdom and puns ad infinitum will run its course and parents will have to start hiring babysitters again.

Frustratingly for the rest of us, this trend shows no sign of ending, and "Bee Movie," in which Seinfeld voices an everybee disenchanted at the prospect of slaving away in the hive for the rest of his life, is the kind of satiating if not wholly satisfying product likely to keep the trend slagging along.

Adults hoping for a little of that trademarked Seinfeldian humor here will have to go in with low expectations. Glimpses of the comic's standup shtick can be found here and there, but "Seinfeld," the TV show, bore the imprint of creator Larry David more than anyone, and he's not associated with "Bee Movie."

Granted, if he was children everywhere would probably be left highly perplexed by this cartoon (sorry, animated motion picture -- we keep forgetting).

Seinfeld, a father of three, knows how to write humor for children, and to his credit he's not beholden to the Disney manual of screenwriting, for this story buzzes all over the place.

Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld) and his best bee-friend, Adam Flayman (Matthew Broderick), are recent bee-school graduates excited about their first day on the job at Honex.

Well, Barry's not. He yearns to become a pollen jockey so he can see what's beyond the hive, and when the movie follows our bee-hero out into the great, wide world the animators are given their first real chance to show off.

"Bee Movie" does amazing things with its subjects' ability to fly; if there has ever been a more aerodynamic animated flick we haven't seen it.

Just as we're expecting this to be a movie about a hive-bound bee's introduction to the big beyond, Barry has an encounter with a human, a florist (gee, that's convenient) named Vanessa (Renee Zellweger).

OK, so this is going to be a opposites-attract love story, right? Only until Barry buzzes into a supermarket and discovers to his horror mass-produced honey, marketed for human consumption without a penny of it coming back to the bees.

Barry, suddenly ambitious, decides to sue the entire human race, and we're off on the road of absurdist farce. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Inevitably, "Bee Movie" has a lot of fun with contrasts in scale; bees, after all, are considerably smaller than humans. Getting hit by a raindrop, for a bee, is like being struck by an SUV for us.

We were impressed to see the film, at least for a while, playing off bees' dramatically shorter lifespans. Barry, for instance, is a graduate of the Class of 9:15 a.m., and his life buzzes right along. But if the movie had kept up with this joke it would've been 15 minutes long.

For a lot of us still living, the cartoons of our youth (Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, et al) were even shorter than that and perfect, rough and crude as they were.

We could find absolutely nothing really wrong with "Bee Movie;" it's a perfectly fine flick that kids will enjoy and parents won't mind sitting through. It's certainly more entertaining than a babysitter.

But it's difficult to find much enthusiasm anymore for a genre that seems to be more about product than art.